Search Content

Displaying results 7151 - 7200 of 87947

Homework for Parents

The New York Times has a story on a novel approach to teaching high-school English: assigning homework to parents: So far, Mr. [Damion] Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.…

Light in Moon's Permanently Dark Craters

I have friend who has been trapped in a mostly underground research facility at the South Pole since early winter. She recently broke her foot, which is just tough luck because nobody gets out of there until spring, which is, I think, in October. This will remind you of the stroy of Dr. Jerri Nielsen, who was at an Antarctic research station and diagnosed herself of having breast cancer, and was rescued rather dramatically back in 1999. Nielsen died, by the way, Tuesday. (Of breast cancer.) Well, my friend at the South Pole is not going to die of a broken foot. (Though perhaps other…

PNAS: Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, Enzyme Scientist

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, who works as a scientist in the food industry.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I am an assistant scientist for an enzyme company. I work in the R&D department; I focus on finding…

Changes to NIH Peer Review

NIH has agreed to some suggestions from advisory panels about how to change the grant peer review process: One year ago, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni asked external and internal advisory panels for advice on how to cope with a record number of applications, a flat NIH budget, and a shortage of quality reviewers. The two panels issued recommendations this winter (Science, 29 February, p. 1169). NIH's response was presented today to the Advisory Committee to the Director by National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research Director Lawrence Tabak. NIH agreed with the panels on the need to…

Why Nicholas Wade Didn't Cover the Amniotic Stem Cell Study, And How He Sees "Wild Overpromise" on Both Sides of the Debate

In the days before the House vote to fund embryonic stem cell research, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ran page one stories heralding a Nature Biotech study that indicated stem cells extracted from amniotic fluid might have "near pluripotent" like properties. Yet, despite the heavy attention from its competitive rivals, the New York Times was silent on the study. (For a full roundup.) Not soon after the front page headlines appeared, as I predicted, the White House and various anti-abortion groups jumped on the study to claimed that it offered an important "middle way." Given the…

A new method for imaging whole-brain structural networks

The higher-order brain functions underlying complex patterns of human behaviour are poorly understood, not least because of the enormous number of neural computations involved. Complex behaviours require the parallel  and integrated activity of hundreds (or even thousands) of discrete brain modules, each consisting of thousands of neurons. For a real understanding of how the brain generates complex behaviours, we need detailed knowledge of the large-scale architecture of the neural networks involved. Visualizing this global architecture is possible with simple organisms.  For example, the…

Nature News article on conference blogging

Geoff Brumfiel has done a great job in this article for Nature News on the promise and perils of conference blogging. On the promise side there is discussion of the wildly successful FriendFeed coverage of last year's ISMB meeting, which ended up being aggregated into a journal article; in the perilous direction, I get a mention for my mildly disastrous foray into conference blogging at the recent Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting. Brumfiel does a good job of conveying the currently chaotic state of conference policies towards the use of social media by participants:…

Good to the bone; adducing honesty via imaging

Update: See Ed Yong. Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert: The research was designed to test two theories about the nature of honesty - the "Will" theory, in which honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, and the "Grace" theory in which honesty is a product of lack of temptation. The results of this study suggest that the "Grace" theory is true, because the honest participants did not show any additional neural…

Atheists - the last U.S. minority that can be openly maligned without consequence

I am sure that you have already heard about the despicable TV ad that Elizabeth Dole aired against Kay Hagan. You probably heard about it online, perhaps on Twitter or FriendFeed or blogs. Here's a quick selection: My godless money. Take it or leave it. The Worst Insult of All? Thou shalt not bear false witness NC: Hagan responds to 'Godless' ad; Dole's immigrant bashing Elizabeth Dole ad falsely suggests opponent Kay Hagan is 'Godless.' North Carolina Senate Race Degenerates Into Shouting Match About Atheists GODLESS AMERICANS. Sen. Liddy Dole (R-NC) attacks Sunday school teacher: 'There is…

Framing Science Talk and Seminar at Cal Tech

Next week, I will be teaming up with Chris Mooney at Cal Tech for an evening lecture followed by a day long science communication seminar for the university's graduate students and post-docs. Details are below along with the suggested reading list. Speaking Science Boot Camp Matthew C. Nisbet & Chris Mooney Over the past several years, the seemingly never-ending controversies over evolution, embryonic stem cell research, global climate change, and many other topics have led to a troubling revelation. Scientific knowledge, alone, does not always suffice when it comes to winning political…

Is reprinting a figure "fair use"?

When Shelley Batts wrote up a report on an article about antioxidants in fruits, she never expected to get contacted by the copyright police, but that's exactly what happened. She had reproduced a table and a figure from the article, and got this notice from an editorial assistant at the publisher: The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a table and graphs taken from a recently published paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. If these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action. She…

Birds in the News 171

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Australia's Superb Parrot, Polytelis swainsonii, is listed as a vulnerable species. Image: Julian Robinson (Canberra ornithologists group) [larger view]. Birds in Science and Technology "In the past, people thought birds were stupid," laments the aptly named scientist Christopher Bird. But in fact, some of our feathered friends are far cleverer than we might think. And one group in particular -- the corvids -- has astonished scientists with extraordinary feats of memory, an ability to employ complex social reasoning…

Birds in the News 170

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter BirdLife's newest flyways project will help to make one of the world's most important bird migration flyways safer for soaring birds. Image: Desert Vu. Birds in Science and Technology Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations. "We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome," said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of the…

From "Kelly Girls" to hotel housekeepers: Women in the contingent workforce

In a New York Times Opinionator column, SUNY Buffalo sociology professor Erin Hatton traces the development of the US temporary-worker industry, which added more jobs than any other over the past three years. Temporary workers generally earn low wages and face job insecurity, and often lack benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance and paid sick leave. Hatton explains that temp agencies offering such disappointing wage and benefits packages emerged in the years following World War II -- and did so despite the growing union power that characterized that era. They managed it, Hatton…

Why not just castrate them? (Part 2): The mainstream media finally notices the Geiers' Lupron protocol

I originally joined this wild and woolly collective known as ScienceBlogs back in February 2006. I was not part of the very first wave of bloggers who made up ScienceBlogs when it launched, although I potentially could have, mainly because I had to work out policies about outside employment with my university before I could join up. In any case, one of the very first posts that I did back then that made a bit of a splash was a little ditty I called in my usual inimitable and restrained fashion, Why not just castrate them? It was the dark saga of an even darker father-and-son tag team of…

Preventing breast cancer: the cancer free economy

By Polly Hoppin, Dick Clapp, Molly Jacobs, Margaret Quinn and David Kriebel We all know a woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, whether she’s our mother, sister, close friend or neighbor.  It’s the most common invasive cancer in women in this country, and we need to get more serious about preventing it. Last month a respected group released a report on breast cancer prevention with a clear and urgent message: “identifying and mitigating the environmental causes of breast cancer is the key to reducing the number of new cases.” The report of the Interagency Breast Cancer and…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Buying Years to Extinction: Is Compensatory Mitigation for Marine Bycatch a Sufficient Conservation Measure for Long-Lived Seabirds?: Along the lines of the 'polluter pays principle', it has recently been proposed…

UK Rock Hall of Fame Ceremony

Last night they showed the induction ceremony for the UK Music Hall of Fame on VH1. I didn't see the first part of the show, only the last part where they inducted Pink Floyd, but that was well worth it. Pete Townsend did the induction, which is appropriate given his friendship with the band and his past collaborations with them (if you've never heard it, go find Townsend's 1985 album White City. Gilmour lends his unmistakeable sound to Give Blood, the best song on the album). Roger Waters wasn't there, but was connected by video, and Gilmour and Nick Mason were there in person to accept the…

Slutty voles & generous humans

Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings: Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one female, and defend territories. Wandering males, in contrast, have expansive home ranges that overlap many males and females. In the laboratory, pairing is regulated by arginine vasopressin and its predominant CNS receptor, vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR). We investigated individual differences in forebrain V1aR…

ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 1: ebooks, blogs and stealthy librarians

Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference. Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…

Talking To The Public

So, Anton Zuiker and I went yesterday to the Talking To The Public panel discussion at Duke, organized by Sigma Xi, The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and The Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. There is nothing yet on their websites about it (the 20th century school of thought!), but the entire panel discussion was taped and I'll let you know once the video is available online (in a week or so?). Once everything is online, it will also be easier for me to write in great detail (links help!) about the event. It was nice to see David Jarmul and Rosalind Reid…

PZ is a Gentleman and a Scholar

tags: PZ Myers, Pharyngula trailer I have noticed with dismay that certain people around here have been bashing PZ Myers (not naming any names, but you know who you are), and I find that upsetting. For the past few years, I have considered PZ and his wife to be good friends of mine, although we do not communicate as frequently as we have in the past (but we're all busy, whatever). But, as with all good friends, I know that they are there for me whenever I might call on them, and I would absolutely do whatever is in my power to help them out as well. What cemented this friendship? I had long…

A Worthy Cause Indeed: Journal Club and Looking Out For The Duck

Well, I'm on vacation as of today and thought now was as good a time as any to show off my primary online love affair. That is, the Science Creative Quarterly of which I am the editor. For the next week or so, I've chosen a piece on the SCQ that I think fits well with a particular blog on the scienceblog consortium. Overall, that means 43 pieces for 43 different blogs presented over the next seven days. Look out for the duck. In the meantime, here is a general description of the Science Creative Quarterly. - - - - A WORTHY CAUSE INDEED - Dear Reader, On most mornings, somewhere in the…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XIV: Discussion

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We conclude our section by section examination of the mathematical modeling paper by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. We have finally arrived at the final section, Discussion (starting on page 8 of the .pdf version). In the second post we said many scientists read only the Abstract,…

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: a Legitimate Excuse for Missing Work

Student guest post by Jay Watson Tired again? Perhaps it's the crappy weather, because you're sure that you've been getting enough sleep. After all, you can't remember the last time you spent less than ten hours in bed per night. Hopefully it's not mono; one of your friends had it a few months ago and it's all but knocked her out. However, you soon realize that you've only talked to her on the phone since she got engaged, so there's no way that's it. It's strange, even everyday activities like running errands has turned into something utterly exhausting. As you consider the reasons as…

Message to Conventional Media: Ur doin it rong!

I was really mad this morning. I glanced at my new issue of Discover, and noticed yet another article glorifying HIV Deniers. Its not online yet, but its a seven page spread on Peter Duesberg. So I brought it to work with me so everyone had to vomit as much as I did. They changed my perspective a bit. First, Im still mad, but Im not as mad. I dont think they are glorifying him-- I think theyre playing to the 'fair and balanced all sides' game that 'journalists' think is so clever these days, which is still pathetic. On the one hand, Jeanne Lenzer plays off of EXPELLEDs theme. You could…

This Is My Hobby

Eugene Wallingford had a post last week about blogging, and popular misconceptions: When I first started writing this blog, several colleagues rolled their eyes. Another blog no one will read; another blogger wasting his time. They probably equated all blogging with the confessional, "what I ate for breakfast" diary-like journal that takes up most of the blogspace. I'm not sure exactly what I expected Knowing and Doing to be like back then, but I never intended to write that sort of blog and made great effort to write only something that seemed worth my time to think about -- and any…

Books: "Collapse" by Jared Diamond

First reviewed on June 18, 2005: Guns, Germs and Steel is an excellent book. Collapse is better. When "Guns, Germs and Steel" first came out, I was fortunate to take part in a graduate seminar that was built around it. Along with reading a chapter each week, we also read a number of additional readings, some of which were technical papers. Careful reading of "Guns, Germs and Steel" reveals that, contrary to some opinion, it is not a work of "environmental determinism". Much of history is microhistory. There is also quite a lot of history studying how quirks and idiosincrasies of important…

Parkinson's Disease in the News

A couple of href="http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch221/ch221g.html" rel="tag">Parkinson's Disease related items came across the news wires, briefly.  There are lessons in both of them, but both leave me with unresolved questions.   The first one I noticed was a report based upon a journal article, rev="review" href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/69/2/187">Risk factors for somnolence, edema, and hallucinations in early Parkinson disease.  The second was based on a different article (in the same journal), href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/01.wnl…

It's news that a teenager is skeptical?

I heard a piece by David Kestenbaum on NPR's "Morning Edition" that hasn't been sitting right with me. You, dear readers, get to help me figure out what's bugging me about the story, a profile of 16-year-old climate skeptic Kristen Byrnes. Here are some details about Kristen Byrnes from the story: "I don't remember how old I was when I started getting into global warming," Kristen says. "In middle school I remember everyone was like: 'Global warming! The world is going to end!' Stuff like that ... so I never really believed in it." ... [S]he has a quality scientists try to cultivate: she is…

Another irresponsible breast cancer alternative cure testimonial

It just occurred to me that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is fast approaching, not the least of which because I did a Komen event last night as one of the breast cancer experts. I sometimes wonder if I suffer from a bit of the imposter syndrome, because sixteen years on I still sometimes can't believe that I'm considered some sort of "expert" in breast cancer, much less anything else. It's not that different than when, as a freshly minted faculty member, I was sent out to our cancer center's affiliates to attend their tumor boards as the "expert" from the mother ship. In any case, in my…

The Australian's War on Science XXIII

The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which is usually a collection of quotes from recent opinion columns in other papers. But like every other part of the paper, it has been used in their unending war on science. Look at the November 12 edition of "Cut and Paste": ABC Radio's Peter Cave reports the IPCC claim the island nation is in imminent danger of climate-induced flooding Mohamed Nasheed (the new Maldives President) has named battling the effects of rising sea levels as a key priority. He's hatched an audacious plan to buy his people a new homeland and one of the…

The Last Eight Years of Governance in a Diplomatic Nutshell

I think this description by a former ambassador of hiring practices in the State Department during the reign of Little Lord Pontchartrain explains so much about the last eight years (italics mine): "YOU know you have arrived when you get interviewed by the 29-year-old instead of the 22-year-old," the 57-year-old foreign service officer said to me with a laugh. It was late 2005, and this three-time ambassador had just been interviewed for a top post at the Department of State. Her interviewer was part of a large corps of 20-somethings -- some were in their early 30s -- who ran the Office of…

ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 2: Swag, Science comedy and #ihuggedbora

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the programming of the recent ScienceOnline 2011 conference. In this post I like to do some quick takes on some of the more pleasurable aspects of the conference. Some random observations: Amazing organization. What more can be said about Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker and all the rest of the great people they've attracted to the ScienceOnline cause? Not much. They all did an amazing job. Bravo! And yes, #ihuggedbora! My Librarian Superpower. The highlight of the Book Fair on Friday night was getting to pick one of the wrapped books from one of…

Holiday fun: peer reviewing

Did you not finish all your papers and grants before the holidays? Do you still have papers to review? Dont be discouraged, Twisted Bacteria has posted humorous quotes to cheer you up. Every December, the journal Environmental Microbiology publishes a collection of quotes made by peer reviewers while assessing manuscripts submitted to the journal. Some of them are hilarious! I am extracting a few of them from the last two years, but I recommend reading them all! Here you go: Desperate referees: This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author's email ID so…

Montgomery College Chemistry Professor Selected for USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Program

Shout out to Montgomery College online for the article on Nifty Fifty Speaker Susan Bontems. Thanks for helping get the word out about the USA Science and Engineering Festival. The USA Science and Engineering Festival selected Montgomery College Professor Susan Bontems and 49 other scientists to visit Washington, D.C.-area middle and high schools, October 10-24, 2010, to ignite a passion for science and engineering in students. Professor Bontems was named the 2009 Maryland Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and…

YouTube and pandemic flu

An influenza pandemic will have many casualties, but truthfully, it never occurred to me YouTube might be one of them: Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly run aground as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic. Such a surge would almost certainly prompt calls to restrict or prioritize traffic, such as blocking video transmissions wherever possible,…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Bats Prey On Nocturnally Migrating Songbirds: It was until now believed that nocturnally migrating songbirds, while venturing into the unfamiliar night sky for accomplishing their long, challenging trans-continental migrations, could at least release anti-predator vigilance thanks to the concealment of darkness. A new study by Spanish and Swiss scientists -- published this week in PLoS ONE -- shows that migration at night is not without predation risk for passerines. New DNA Method Helps Explain Extinction Of Woolly Mammoth, Other Ice Age Mammals: What caused the extinction of the woolly…

Things Forthcoming!

I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now (I'm always doing a bunch of stuff, actually) that I thought I'd mention here. First, on Monday March 21, at 5:30 I'll be at the first Unitarian Universalist Society in Albany talking to Congressman Paul Tonko about peak oil, climate change and regional preparedness in an event put on by Capital District Transition. It ought to be interesting! Drop me an email if you have suggestions for questions you'd like me to put to Congressman Tonko. Second, on April 9 at 7pm, I'll be at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY, talking about food, energy…

Lindau Nobel conference - Tuesday afternoon and dinner

Today was a busy day. I was somewhat surprised at how shy people are of the little Flip camera - so much worry about the future career prospects if one does something seemingly 'unprofessional' like say a couple of words about one's research for the Lindau YouTube channel and my blog. But see the two interviews below, and I got a few more promise to do it tomorrow. I bet Nobel Laureates will be easier to persuade than the young researchers! In the afternoon, although it was very hot, I put on my shirt and tie (instead of my 'Ida' t-shirt) for the Open Access panel which I shared with Sir…

Comments on the Edwards interview go here...

In a few minutes, I will post the interview with Sen. John Edwards on this blog. All the questions are related to science (and yes, it was not easy to cut down the number of questions and the length of each question - there is so much to ask) so they should be of interest to the readers of this blog. As I am not a journalist or an analyst who needs to preserve an appearance of 'balance', I have always been unabashedly open about my support for John Edwards, first in 1998 when he ran for the Senate (that was the first election I could vote in after becoming a US citizen), then in 2003/04 when…

Bicycling in China, the Twin Cities, and the Senate

Bicycling has been in the news a lot this week. E&E News reports that China is trying to get people back onto bicycles in an attempt to address traffic problems. The city of Zhongshan has launched a bike-sharing system with 4,000 bikes; Hangzhou and Shanghai have systems with 50,000 and 19,000 bikes, respectively. Reporter Coco Liu contrasts these figures to the US's largest bike-sharing program: DC's, with 1,100 bikes. (Read my earlier post on Capital Bikeshare here.) Even with such relatively large systems, though, demand can quickly outstrip supply, as when a train full of homeward-…

How To Plot A Coordinate Dataset In Google Maps

As an archaeologist I often need to plot coordinates on maps and plans. At every scale, really: from individual finds on the plan of an excavation trench to the distribution of something across Europe. Just dots of varying shapes and colours on various background maps. Most often, it's GPS data from field walking and metal detecting. My colleagues in contract archaeology and academe use ArcInfo for these things, but I've never had incentive or opportunity to learn to use it. Also, once you know the software, you still need a map to plot stuff on, and those are expensive. So I've been…

Go On Till You Come to the End; Then Stop

ScienceBlogs is coming to an end. I don't know that there was ever a really official announcement of this, but the bloggers got email a while back letting us know that the site will be closing down. I've been absolutely getting crushed between work and the book-in-progress and getting Charlie the pupper, but I did manage to export and re-import the content to an archive site back on steelypips.org. (The theme there is an awful default WordPress one, but I'm too slammed with work to make it look better; the point is just to have an online archive for the temporary redirects to work with.) I'm…

Links for 2010-06-05

IPN announces Ninth Annual Bastiat Prize Competition | International Policy Network "For the ninth year, International Policy Network (IPN) is accepting submissions for its annual Bastiat Prize for Journalism. The Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world whose published articles eloquently and wittily explain, promote and defend the principles and institutions of the free society. Submissions must be received on or before 30 June 2010. In addition to the Bastiat Prize for Journalism (First - $10,000; Second - $4,000; Third - $1,000), we are again awarding the Bastiat Prize for Online…

Academic Poll: To Grade, or Not to Grade?

Over at Dot Physics, Rhett wonders about the role of homework in a world that includes cramster: Then what is the problem? The problem is with my jobs. Yes, jobs. I have two jobs. My first job is to help students learn. I am a learning-faciliator if you like. I do this in many different ways. One way is to assign homework. Oh, my other job is to evaluate how well students understand the material. I have to give them some grade at the end of the semester. One obvious way to do this is with an exam or feats of strength. Here is the question: Do you grade homework? Oh, I know what everyone says…

Isis does SciWo's summer wardrobe

Two months ago, at the beginning of the summer, I asked Dr. Isis, the goddess of all things domestic and laboratory, for some fashion advice. My problem was one of hot outside-cold inside - which is pretty unappealing when referring to undercooked microwaved food - but also pretty obnoxious when you are talking about frigid offices in sizzling summer weather. Here's part of what I asked Dr. Isis: Please, oh goddess of style, recommend a blazer or sweater that will be versatile enough to see me through summer work sessions in a frigid office and impromptu meetings across campus. Ideally this…

Things I've learned from my semester

My students tell me that there are only 20 days of class left this semester. I've been too busy to count. Unfortunately, it's been too-busy-with-things-that-don't-make-a-compelling-tenure-case. But, maybe, just maybe, I can salvage this mess of a semester by learning some lessons for how now to conduct future semesters. So in RBOC-fashion here's what I've discovered. Loading up my teaching on Mondays and Wednesdays did not actually produce "free" days for research. First Tuesday got filled up with student meetings and class prep for my marathon Wednesdays. Then Thursday got filled up with…

Undeclared drugs in herbal and non-botanical dietary supplements

An interesting question arose the other day when we discussed the Key West acupuncturist who was diverting prescription drugs for personal use as well as in her practice. While we are not certain that the defendant put the cited muscle relaxants and anxiolytics in remedies doled out at her practice, we doubt that the demographic she targeted would be too impressed if she were to hand out prescription drugs. This scenario led our scientific and blogging colleague, DrugMonkey, to ask how common it might be for alternative practitioners to dope their herbs with prescription drugs exhibiting…

DonorsChoose 2009: Giving What We're Abel

I can't believe October's here already and it's time again for our annual social media challenge to raise money for US science teachers. Last year, eight generous, erudite, and good-looking Terra Sig readers donated at total of $1,972 to impact the lives of 1,865 students. I've got started a little late but three of you already hunted me down and have donated a total of $1,737 - due primarily to our perennial megadonor, Diana, who shares the good fortune in her life with kids to combat the anti-science nonsense she sees around this country. DonorsChoose.org is "an online charity connecting…